How to format your references using the Constraints citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Constraints. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Gavaghan, H. (2000). New UK legislation aids fight against discrimination. Nature, 405(6787), 716–717.

A journal article with 2 authors

Matthews, P. G. D., & Seymour, R. S. (2006). Diving insects boost their buoyancy bubbles. Nature, 441(7090), 171.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bonsall, M. B., Jansen, V. A. A., & Hassell, M. P. (2004). Life history trade-offs assemble ecological guilds. Science (New York, N.Y.), 306(5693), 111–114.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Yeh, J. T.-H., Binari, R., Gocha, T., Dasgupta, R., & Perrimon, N. (2013). PAPTi: a peptide aptamer interference toolkit for perturbation of protein-protein interaction networks. Scientific reports, 3, 1156.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Exposito, E., & Diop, C. (2014). Smart SOA Platforms in Cloud Computing Architectures. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Oosterom, P. van, Zlatanova, S., Penninga, F., & Fendel, E. M. (Eds.). (2008). Advances in 3D Geoinformation Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Angermann, L., Shestopalov, Y. V., & Yatsyk, V. V. (2015). Eigenmodes of Linearised Problems of Scattering and Generation of Oscillations on Cubically Polarisable Layers. In L. Beilina (Ed.), Inverse Problems and Applications (pp. 67–80). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Constraints.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, February 13). This Is The Submarine NASA’s Wants To Use To Explore Titan. IFLScience. IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://www.iflscience.com/space/check-out-nasa-s-conceptual-submarine-explore-titan-s-kraken-mare/

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. (1996). Improving Federal Performance in the Information Age Issue Area Plan: Fiscal Years 1996-98 (No. IAP-96-8). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Ayres, R. (2017). Optimization of a Novel Oxy-Michael Ugi-Smiles Reaction (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Alderman, L. (2017, October 1). Europe Surveys the Gig Economy And Wants Worker Safeguards. New York Times, p. B1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Constraints
Abbreviation	Constraints
ISSN (print)	1383-7133
ISSN (online)	1572-9354
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Computational Theory and Mathematics Software Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics